There’s lots to like about the initiative. The UI is simple and intuitive, at least for me. The projects are actually listed before decisions are made. Descriptions are intelligible in the main, and contain useful information beyond budgets, such as job-creation. In each case the question posed is simple: is the project critical? Here’s an example:

I touched on some of this in my Clay Shirky at the ICA post. One of the key issues that came up that day was the issue of identity, how to make sure that the right person voted, how to make sure that the person voted once and once only. This is not resolved here either. But it can be.

There are a million people out there who will criticise this thing to bits. Let me not be one of them. I like the transparency. I like the fact that someone has invested time and effort to take public domain information and make it more shareable, more enrichable, and as a result perhaps a little more comprehensible. I like the simplicity of the UI, a search-based front and a consumable wiki. I appreciate the existence of an excel file with all the source info, available for download.

For democratised action to have any meaning, citizens need to be informed. The more informed they are, the more likely it is that their action will have value.

The availability of tools like Stimulus.org is a good sign. [One of the first things I am going to do is to mutate the tool in order to make it useful for enterprises to prioritise their projects!]. The very existence of the data in a downloadable form allows for mashups to be created with relative ease, particularly those with geographical overlays, as in this example taken from epolitics:

There’s a long way to go, many problems to solve. But there are encouraging signs. Views?

PS it is worth going to stimulus.org just to read Jerry Brito’s paper on Hack, Mash and Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency. You can find it in the About Us section.

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8 thoughts on “Thinking about earmarks and democratisation”

http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/1216407735 Obama’s election was not just about a grassroots campaign, it is also about grassroots governance. The grassroots has to be more involved now in 2009 than it was in 2008. And, golley, was it involved in 2008!

You are to be complimented for not joining the chorus of nay sayers who criticize every move taken by others. Additionally, for all the whining that we do about spin, misinformation, misrepresentation, and such, there is truly only one solution: The appreciation and absorption of information through education. Always has been, always will be.